At the time there was no obvious reason not to trust that OpenAI was trying to act for the benefit of society, per their charter, so it seemed like an abundance of caution, and this level of LLM capability was new to most of us, so it was hard to guess how dangerous it actually was...
However, in retrospect, seeing how OpenAI continues to behave, it may well have just been to get publicity.
This whole "Be warned, we're about to release something that will destroy society!" shtick seems to be a recurring thing with the AI CEOs, specifically Altman and Amodei (who switched into hardcore salesman mode about a year ago).
The latest Twitter "warning" from Altman is to claim that their AI will soon be at the level of their AI developers, and so we should be prepared (for the self-accelerating singularity I suppose). Maybe this inspired someone to write him another trillion dollar check?
Yeah.
At the time there was no obvious reason not to trust that OpenAI was trying to act for the benefit of society, per their charter, so it seemed like an abundance of caution, and this level of LLM capability was new to most of us, so it was hard to guess how dangerous it actually was...
However, in retrospect, seeing how OpenAI continues to behave, it may well have just been to get publicity.
This whole "Be warned, we're about to release something that will destroy society!" shtick seems to be a recurring thing with the AI CEOs, specifically Altman and Amodei (who switched into hardcore salesman mode about a year ago).
The latest Twitter "warning" from Altman is to claim that their AI will soon be at the level of their AI developers, and so we should be prepared (for the self-accelerating singularity I suppose). Maybe this inspired someone to write him another trillion dollar check?